doug> Kendall Clark wrote:
>> Easily avoidable animal suffering aside, a vegetarian diet is
>> pretty widely conceded to be more healthy for its consumer than a
>> meat-rich diet. Surely there's *some* moral value in maximizing
>> one's own health?
doug> Moral value? I don't know, why should health be a moral value
doug> in itself?
I didn't say anything about "in itself"... There are indirect moral goods, after all. Perhaps health is one of those. For example, I'd like to be physically fit enough to pursue all of my other projects and plans. Being overweight and in less than ideal cardio shape means that I'm limited, in some degree, from pursuing my projects and plans as fully as I might like.
Further, the attainment or maintenance of physical health seems to be universalizable. It's hard to imagine cases in which attaining physical health is a *harm* and not a good.
I'd like *others* to be physically fit enough to pursue their projects and plans, perhaps especially others upon whom I rely in some way.
But the Greeks certainly thought physical health was a kind of direct moral good; on, if for no other reason, proper-function grounds. I'm not sure I agree with that warrant, but it's not *obviously* or trivially wrong.
Let's take the inverse; physical suffering, disease, and ill-health certainly can be, especially when it is undeserved, as it very often is, a fairly clear cut case of *evil*. Cf., for example, John Kekes' *Facing Evil* (Princeton, 1990).
Does that make the sick guilty of some
doug> transgression against morality?
Of course not! Not every *absence* of moral good is morally blameworthy. Shit does, in fact, happen. (In other words, the counterweighted terms here are "good" and "harm", not "morally praiseworthy" and "morally blameworthy".)
For example, surely a massive earthquake in some remote and impoverished part of the world is a great natural evil, and yet no one is to blame for it occurring. One way to describe that evil is that it causes the widespread absence of many direct moral goods: life, shelter, food and water, integrity of familial bonds, integrity of physical bodies, and so on.
(I almost used 'mud slide' as an example, but that's tricky since they often result or are exacerbated by rapacious tree harvesting.)
That makes me a bit nervous
doug> (though I don't want to bring up the Nazis, so as not to upset
doug> Gordon).
Bah! It seems abundantly clear that the Nazi eugenic genocide had *nothing* to do with the physical health of *individuals* as a kind of moral good. Killing individuals for "polluting the race" isn't even remotely related to whether physical health is some kind of moral good or whether its absence is some kind of moral harm.
And, by the way, I think mentioning the Nazis is rather a cheap shot. :>
Best, Kendall Clark